Content

Opening and Humor

Never start with a joke.

People don’t laugh because something’s funny. They laugh because they feel good, and they don’t feel good until they feel safe.

Humor is a strong sign of a solid presentation, but it only can come when you’ve established an environment where the audience can feel safe, and then when they can feel good. A joke at the start of a presentation will just make everyone feel awkward.

Here are five steps to a successful opening.

• Step one. Stand in the middle of the stage, and tell the audience your full name with downwards inflection. “Hey, I’m Steven Schmatz.” rather than something along the lines of “Hey, I’m Steven Schmatz…?”.
• Step two. State your relevant credentials. Not what you’ve done, not how long you’ve worked at job X, but what your specific skillset can help do for the audience. Bad: “Hi, I’m Steven and I write code.”. Good: “Hi, I’m Steven and I create interfaces that are easier to use.”
• Step three. Give a hook. Tell them why they’re seeing your presentation. All pitches attempt to improve one or more of these three qualities for the audience: happiness, success, and freedom. Which does yours speak to? How?
• Step four. Build a circle of knowledge. To keep the audience’s attention, as well as to build trust, you have to make the presentation have a bidirectional flow of information. A powerful way to do this is by asking a question which requires the audience member to think for herself, then asking them to discuss with each other, and finally asking them to tell their ideas to you, the presenter. This can effectively show you care about the audience.
• Step five. Summarize your takeaways. How are the audience members’ lives going to be different after they leave your talk?

Example:

Hi, I’m Steven Schmatz, a professional dog walker. Today, I’m going to show you a technique to more effectively walk your dog with jetpacks, so you will be able to save hours of time in the future.

Agenda

You should not be worried about forgetting what to say if you follow these steps. If you present on a topic, you should be an expert — I have never met an expert who presents and forgets what they were going to say. They just need something to remind them in case they lose their train of thought.

Both you and your audience should have a general image of what you are going to say, but it’s your job to fill in the specific parts. You should create an agenda of topics to cover, in the following format:

• Start with an action verb.
• Every bullet should have 7 words or less.
• There is no jargon — you want clear, short words.

Bad examples:

• Can leasing provide solutions to challenges facing banks?
• Are these risky assets?
• Review the leasing value proposition for your customer
• Examples of local market opportunity

Good examples:

• Expand your loan services
• Discuss the problem you are solving.
• Present your solution.
• Ask for questions.

If you feel that 7 words is not enough to describe a task, make a sub-task. Hierarchical organization is easier to visualize than a longer, linear organization.

Closing

Closing statements should be of the form:

• Summarize what you told them.
• Tell them why they wanted it.
• Ask for questions (see below).
• Part with warm, genuine words.

Don’t thank people for their time. It doesn’t sound genuine, and it implies that their time could have been better spent elsewhere.

Captivate the audience

This is incredibly important. Audience members will want to tune out approximately every 10 minutes, so you should have a strategy to combat this.

Know your audience

The best way to tailor your approach to your audience is to ask them. There’s no magic to this – it can be anything from sending them emails to your target audience asking them what they want, or it can even be in the form of walking around the presentation room and meeting everyone before your presentation. This is also an effective way to calm your nerves before a big presentation.

This is important, because different audiences have different reasons why they are at your presentation. Find out what your audience wants, and give it to them.

Make the audience reflect

The best TED talks always have one thing in common: at some point in the talk, the presenter tells the audience an amazing concepts, pauses, and then says these three magical words: “think about that.” Making the audience reflect on what your saying leaves a lasting impression on them.

Enthusiasm

One of your roles as the presenter should be to manipulate the excitement level of the audience to complement the content you are presenting. This means that it’s bad to start with tons of enthusiasm when your audience just isn’t there yet. Most pitches make this mistake – they come into the presentation with sunshines and rainbows when the audience is firmly planted in the real world. It detracts from your credibility.

It’s much better to match their skeptical and curious attitude towards you at the beginning of the presentation than to jump into a magical sparkly Valhalla full of happiness right away.

Ask the right questions

Successful presenters pose important questions ahead of time — they create mysteries that will be solved by the end of the presentation. People have to listen to you to get what they want. That’s how you keep their attention.

Successful questions fall into three categories:

Recall questions

These questions usually reiterate what you have taught and link it to what you are teaching now. They are of the form “remember how I told you X”.

Leading questions

These are questions that possess these qualities: there is a correct answer, the audience does not know that answer, but the audience can figure it out with knowledge you’ve given them. For example, if I asked if this question was a recall question or a leading question, which one would it be? So meta.

Relevance questions.

These questions ask the audience to relate what they’ve learned to their life. This is the most important question for a pitch — you have to convince your audience that your product will make their life better.

Voice

Pace

The best presenters in the world speak between 140 and 180 words per minute. If you speak faster than this, you’re not being concise enough.

Volume

This is something that a lot of people get wrong. When you have to say something important, don’t make your voice louder. Make it quieter.

Vocabulary

Avoid terms of uncertainty

You can’t deliver a good pitch if you say these a lot: “I think”, “I hope”, “I guess”, “I feel”… etc.

• I think
• I hope
• I guess
• I feel

Instead, say these:

• I will
• Going to
• Surely
• Absolutely

If you use these words, it will make you look more confident as well as more credible. Credibility and confidence are two vital parts to a presentation, so this is incredibly important.

Often, presenters are afraid of using direct vocabulary because they’re worried that they’ll offend someone. However, it’s not your words that make a difference. It’s your inflection. If you change your inflection effectively to convey your message, you can “soften the blow” of direct language and at once sound confident and kind.

Brevity

Being concise will save you time and attention.

Negative words

Never say “but”. Eliminate it from your presenting vocabulary. It completely negates everything that is said in the first part of the sentence, and makes you seem more limited.

Instead, use a short pause.

Filler words

Just as with the negative words, if you replace all filler words with a short pause, you will appear much more commanding in your presentation. Filler words include the typical “um” and “like”, and also words like “so” and “okay”.

Words that imply deception

You should also be wary of words like “frankly”. This will make your audience question if you were being frank with them before you said it! If you really want to get someone to listen to you, decrease your volume, talk slower, and decrease your inflection.

Controlling words

If you tell someone to not touch a button, they’re going to want it. Rather than telling your seven year old “do not jump”, it’s much better to say “stand still”. In persuasive talks, instead of telling the audience controlling boundaries, assert expectations to seem confident while still appearing kind.

Body language

In a commonly referenced study by Albert Mehrabian in the 1950s, researchers studied what factors determined the emotional impact of the speaker on their audience. 55% of participants reported that body language was most important, with tone coming next and finally the message amounting for a measly 7%.

This is a pretty natural outcome – if you want to persuade someone, what communication medium would you choose? Most people would say that they would like to interview in person, to reveal body language. Next is persuasion through the phone, where you still can preserve your tone. Finally, it’s quite difficult to persuade someone through text alone. Hence, body language is important.

Stance

Stand roughly 5–10 feet away from the first row, depending on how large your audience is. You should aim to stand as close to the middle as possible, with very little movement on stage. Stand up straight and face the audience.

Hands

Use hand gestures sparingly. When you use hand gestures, they will seem powerful and purposeful. Keep your hands by your side and out of your pockets. A common fidget is to keep your hands in front of your chest or your face.

Eyes

Keeping eye contact with the audience is important. You should divide the audience into nine sections, like a tic-tac-toe board. You should aim to look at each section for at least three seconds every minute to keep the audience engaged.

Keep the audience engaged

Manage your time

You don’t want to be that guy who presents at a slow pace, and realizes when two minutes are left that he’s out of time. What if someone came to see your presentation just for those last two minutes?

An effective way to manage your time is to create a timetable:

• Step one. How much time are you going to allocate for questions? A good rule of thumb is about 10 minutes per hour, with 5 minutes during the presentation and 5 minutes at the end.
• Step two. Distribute the remaining time across your topics in your agenda.
• Step three. Find what point you’re going to be at the 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 marks. Note it down, and use those as checkpoints for your presentation.

Answer questions

Asking and answering questions is often the most intimidating part of presenting, for both the presenter and the audience. The main fear that drives this intimidation for both parties is a fear of disapproval from peers. Luckily, there are techniques to decrease this fear on both sides.

Polling for questions

When you ask if there are any questions, never ask “are there any questions?”, but rather “what are your questions”. The latter assumes that the audience has questions, whereas the former is a bland yes/no question for which the default answer is “no”. To make matters worse, if everyone else seems to not have questions, it will be even more embarrassing for an audience member to ask a valid question — compounding the problem.

It takes roughly 7 seconds after you ask a question for valuable questions to surface:

• The first 2 seconds are spent processing the question.
• The next 3 seconds are spent thinking of an answer to the question.
• The remaining 2 seconds are spent gathering the courage for someone to raise their hand (remember, the main fear of the audience is the fear of embarrassment in front of peers!).

Answering questions

In any case, you have to show the audience that you care about their question. The first decision you should make is if the question is in scope or not — will every single person in the audience benefit from your answer?

If the question is out of scope, here is how you should handle it: “I have thoughts for that, so write the question down and come to me at the end of presentation and I’ll answer it.”

If the question is in scope:

• Step one. Paraphrase the question. This is valuable on two fronts — first, it buys you time to come up with an answer, and second, it helps everyone else know which question you are answering.
• Step two. Thank the person for asking the question. Audience feedback is incredibly valuable to a successful presentation.
• Step three. Handle the question. If you know the answer, great. If you don’t, though, you can answer with something along the lines of this:

“I have a few thoughts on that, but I want to get you the exact answer you’re looking for. So I’ll tell you what, write it down, and I’ll get you the answer after the presentation.”

One warning, though. If you use roughly three “I don’t know”s, then your credibility is done. Always come prepared for questions.